Editorials
The Outliers: Horror’s Greatest Directors and Their Black Sheep Films, Volume One
There is a pantheon of filmmakers whose names are synonymous with effective, terrifying, groundbreaking horror films. You know who they are, and if you’re reading this site, you’ve likely seen most if not all of their body of work.
But there are some that don’t get revisited as often as others. For any filmmaker who has made more than three films, there will always be a black sheep in the family. A film that is not as beloved, is lesser known, or simply never achieved the critical or cult status of their other works.
While we want to recognize the greatest work these pantheon filmmakers have created, it’s sometimes fun and illuminating to look at the black sheep in the family, to see what went wrong, to look at it through the lens of the filmmaker’s otherwise stellar career, and sometimes just to decide if we feel the black sheep status is unjustly applied or understandably forgotten. So who are the first five filmmakers, and what are those black sheep films?
The Filmmaker: Wes Craven
The Body of Work:
A college professor whose career began when he was 33, he didn’t waste any time in creating a huge impact with Last House on the Left, one of the most notorious horror/revenge films of all time. He followed it with The Hills Have Eyes a few years later, and joined the ranks of horror icon history when he created Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. He revisited his own creation in 1994, helping give birth to meta-horror with New Nightmare, and codified the new subgenre by directing every entry in the successful Scream franchise.
The Black Sheep Nominees:
Because it isn’t a horror film, we shouldn’t include Music of the Heart, a drama starring Meryl Streep as an inner-city violin teacher. The same goes for his early-era porn film, The Fireworks Woman (yes, that’s real). There is no lack of opinions from Craven fans about certain films like Swamp Thing, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, Deadly Friend, and Vampire in Brooklyn; they’re not forgotten films as much as third rails of the Craven filmography that might kill you if you step on them in the wrong company. Deadly Blessing and The People Under the Stairs have earned legitimate cult status to varying degrees, so what does that leave?
Maybe his black sheep is in his television work. Chiller, Stranger in Our House, Invitation to Hell, and Night Visions are all films Craven made for television in the years between Last House on the Left and returning for New Nightmare. But they’re early films that had spotty home releases, often in quickie discs that plastered his more famous horror titles across the top in an effort to peddle the films to unsuspecting viewers. If rarity and weirdness were the only criteria for a TV black sheep, we might as well nominate the “Casebusters” episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. No, the true black sheep of Craven’s family is…
The Black Sheep Winner:
…My Soul to Take.
A film that isn’t truly terrible enough to gain laughable cult status, and nowhere near good enough to stand as a strong example of his work, the 2010 film had a lot going against it. A post-conversion to 3-D to cash in on a fad, poor box office performance, worse reviews; even things that had been boons in Craven’s other films, like a cast of up-and-coming teen actors, a central whodunit mystery, and a sprinkling of Catholic themes and imagery, were largely uninspired and fell flat.
The Verdict:
Understandably Forgotten.
The Filmmaker: John Carpenter
The Body of Work:
Do I need to waste your time with this? He redefined indie horror success with Halloween, reinvented a classic terror with The Thing, turned weather into a villain with The Fog, amalgamated Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft with In the Mouth of Madness, and made us afraid of nice cars, vats of green goo, and sunglasses (Christine, Prince of Darkness, and They Live, respectively).
The Black Sheep Nominees:
Because John Carpenter is such a singular filmmaker, his movies tend to run hit and miss, but even the misses have their loyal supporters. Body Bags is a guilty pleasure for many (possibly because of his fun on-screen performance); Someone’s Watching Me is a surprisingly assured early TV film, though it is missing Carpenter’s signature score; and Vampires is a mediocre film elevated by a couple of unbelievably committed performances.
There is certainly an argument to be made for The Ward as deserving of the Black Sheep award. The only reason it escapes that designation is because it is (as of this writing) the last feature film that John Carpenter has made. We all fear it is possible that it will be the last film he makes, if the number of cigarettes Carpenter lights during every commentary track is any accurate measure of how long he will remain with us; and like Jimmy Stewart’s career ending with an uninspired voice-over in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, we live in fear of it being the anticlimactic end to a fantastic run. No, the film that takes the award is…
The Black Sheep Winner:
…Village of the Damned.
If rumors are to be believed, it was a film John Carpenter didn’t even particularly want to make. Legend goes that he directed the remake of the intellectual property in order to get a crack at one that he liked even more: The Day the Earth Stood Still. When Village of the Damned did poorly at the box office, the film he really wanted to make magically never materialized.
The lackluster performances from Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley matched Carpenter’s general level of disinterest, and although a few of the child performances show promise, the tension in the film’s pacing and plot dry up a few minutes after the intriguing opening premise. Add to that a nomination for Worst Remake at the Golden Raspberrry Awards and the fact that 1995 was the last year for Christopher Reeve before an accident confined him to a wheelchair, and it’s understandable why this film has been allowed to vanish quietly.
The Verdict:
Understandably Forgotten.
The Filmmaker: George A. Romero
The Body of Work:
Just add your choice of words to the beginning of the phrase “of the Dead.” Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead. He may have made some films about things that were living, too.
Oh, and Creepshow. A high-water mark in anthology horror and a loving tribute to the morbid comics everyone’s parents blamed for their disturbed children.
The Black Sheep Nominees:
This is a difficult list to create. Aside from certain entries in the Dead series, many horror fans consider movies like Martin and Monkey Shines some of his most interesting and accomplished work, thanks to committed performances and offbeat stories not found in mainstream horror fare.
Two Evil Eyes is nowhere near the brilliant anthology film that Creepshow was, but it dodges Black Sheep status because Romero and Argento working together on a film is valuable for sheer curiosity. Knightriders and There’s Always Vanilla escape judgement because they’re not horror films, and Season of the Witch (or Hungry Wives or Jack’s Wife) was so ahead of its time thematically that I believe its most appreciative audience is actually still finding it. No, Romero’s Black Sheep award goes to…
The Black Sheep Winner:
…Bruiser.
What an unusual film. A frumpy nothing of a man who is marginalized at his job, humiliated by his wife, and is spending a lot of time fantasizing about suicide and worse. After being unable to paint a blank white mask to express himself, he wakes up the next morning to find the mask now covering his own face. He is erased, unreal, nothing. And with that comes the luxury of casting of societal norms. Watch out world, Henry Creedlow is pissed off.
Weird, uneven, and overly symbolic… but still, there’s something scrappy about this obtuse and completely uncommercial film. With an interesting lead character portrayed by “That Guy” Jason Flemyng, and over-the-top performance from Peter Stormare (including a cameo from his penis), and an appearance from punk band The Misfits, I understand why people have forgotten it, but… I just can’t.
The Verdict:
Unjustly Applied.
The Filmmaker: David Cronenberg
The Body of Work:
‘Body’ is the right word to describe his work. Since he started altering physiology back in Shivers, Cronenberg has made a critically well-received and moderately profitable career off of the slow changing of the human body: Rabid, The Brood, The Fly. Even his more popular and less horror-driven films, like Eastern Promises and the play adaptation M. Butterfly, deal with the rigorous physical changes that his protagonists put themselves through.
The Black Sheep Nominees:
Because he came out of the gate so strongly in the horror arena, there are few misses in his work. Sure, we have some questions about why Cronenberg made a 1979 car racing exploitation film called Fast Company, but it’s not horror, so we let it go.
Somehow, the less commercial Cronenberg’s films are, the more cult famous they seem to be. Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and Crash are extremely weird and idiosyncratic, and they have garnered him some of his most die-hard fans. His emotionally reserved and coldly calculating films like Dead Ringers and The Dead Zone have found crossover love from even non-horror fans due to their performances and meticulous direction. In this case, the award for David Cronenberg’s most under-remembered film is…
The Black Sheep Winner:
…Spider.
And frankly, it makes no sense. Unlike Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, Spider was somehow not nominated for an Academy Award for Ralph Fiennes’ stunning, complex performance as a mentally ill man trying to slowly work his way back into society. This film almost didn’t make the list because it barely registers as a horror film, but some of the subject matter, the frankness of content, and the truly disturbing nature of the story allow for a certain leeway (not to mention that the film is fantastic and criminally underrated).
The Verdict:
Unjustly Applied.
The Filmmaker: Tobe Hooper
The Body of Work:
The most unusual of the filmmakers on the list, Tobe Hooper exploded out of the gate with his first feature film, the notorious and surprisingly beautiful artsploitation film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. His subsequent output was a varied as it was interesting: a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot; a darkly comedic sequel in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; the box-office super-success Poltergeist that was (rumored to be) mostly directed by Hooper’s producer, Steven Spielberg; and the “definitely directed by Hooper” one-two punch of Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars.
The Black Sheep Nominees:
The rest of Hooper’s career is a mixed bag that is equal parts candy, nails, hot air, and sawdust. He worked with Robert Englund twice in a row with Night Terrors and The Mangler, which is enough to keep them from relative obscurity. His most recent feature, Djinn, is a mildly interesting story that has a very interesting premise; the same can be said for his remake of Toolbox Murders, where he injected a supernatural thread that livened up the proceedings. He even directed one segment of the aforementioned Body Bags, which is possibly the best sequence in the film.
The Black Sheep could be the 2005 film Mortuary, or the 1990 Spontaneous Combustion, both of which barely reached my radar when they were released initially and haven’t done anything to work themselves back into my thoughts since. But the last mention in this article should be a high note, so let’s end with a Black Sheep award for Tobe Hooper’s work on…
The Black Sheep Winner:
…Eaten Alive.
So much of what worked in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre returned in this film because so many of the people who made it returned for this one. Wayne Bell was back to create weird sounds that were sort of a musical score; Marilyn Burns was back on the screen, and Kim Henkel helped commit more disturbing words and actions to paper.
The film isn’t quite as beautiful as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre due to the absence of cinematographer Daniel Pearl (who went on to win many awards in the world of music videos), but the sleazy grindhouse charm is still present and accounted for. Add to that the first pairing of Hooper with Robert Englund and an appearance from a young lady who would grow into one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and we have a film with multiple reasons to be remembered that doesn’t get remembered enough.
The Verdict:
Unjustly Applied.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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